Less straightforward than competing site builders. Fewer and more restrictive templates than the competition. No free level. Lacks third-party widget marketplace. Little customization for mobile sites.

Bottom Line

Squarespace lets you build a modern, beautiful, responsive website for desktop and mobile viewing, and it also offers the potential for full-scale commerce.

Squarespace is one of the hippest DIY website builders around. It backs up its style with loads of capabilities and integrations, including support for Apple Pay, Mailchimp, and PayPal. All sites built with it get free SSL and domain registration. It's not as simple to use as Wix or Duda, however, both of which also offer more third-party widget integration. Still, Squarespace builds some of the best-looking sites around, with bona fide responsive design.

Squarespace Pricing

Although Squarespace offers no long-term free account option, as Weebly and Wix do, you can try it free for two weeks, though your test site won't be live on the web until you pay for an account. Accounts start at $12 per month (billed annually) for the Personal level, which includes a site of up to 20 pages. They run up to $40 per month for the Advanced Commerce plan, which serves up unlimited bandwidth with real-time shipping integration. In between is the $18-per-month business plan, which lets you sell with a 3 percent transaction fee, and the $26-per-month Basic Online Store, which removes that fee (as does the Advanced Commerce plan). The rates are reasonable if somewhat expensive when compared with the entry-level pricing of 1&1 MyWebsite ($9.99), Jimdo ($7.50), Weebly ($8), and Wix ($10).

The price includes website hosting. You also get one year of free domain registration if you're on an annual payment schedule, but you can also connect a domain you already own to your Squarespace-built site. After the first year, domain pricing varies between $20 and $70 per year, depending on the desirability of the URL you chose. Monthly subscribers need to pay that right off the bat.

As with pretty much every site builder, you start the actual design process by picking a template. Squarespace offers 91 good-looking options, having adding significantly to the number of choices it offered just a couple of years ago. Eight are new for this year alone. Many feature full photo backgrounds, and some offer scrolling interfaces. After selecting a template, you create an online account by entering your name, email, and password—no credit card is required at this point.

You next choose a category, such as Media, Music, Travel, and so on. Then—and this is a nice touch—you choose goals for your site, such as announcing events, showcasing art, blogging, or selling products. Next in this initial step-by-step startup is choosing whether your site is for yourself, a friend, a client, business, or other. You then enter a site description, and, finally, a title for the site.

Interface

Like the pages Squarespace designs, its editing interface is one of the most elegant things around, though perhaps not the most intuitive. You can't just start editing the template site. Rather, you have to first create a page based on any template page. Furthermore, the lack of a sidebar for adding elements, like that in Duda, is disorienting at first. Instead of using a permanent toolbar along the side of the builder interface, Squarespace opens a dialog box of content items when you click on a spot on your page that can accept a new element.

You hover the mouse over an available content block (which appears as a sort of sideways teardrop icon) to edit or add more elements. This marker includes a horizontal line, and sometimes it can be hard to figure out which element two overlapping markers belong to. You edit in full-page view, and you just tap the Edit button at the top or on an element to start editing. The first time you do this, a help box pops up with an animation walking you through the process.

Prefab page layouts for things like About, Contact, and Team pages look great, and you may not need to modify their layouts at all.

Squarespace lets you navigate your site using the navigation on the preview itself, rather than making you use a separate menu, as Wix does. There's a healthy selection of page elements to choose from, one of which lets you enter markdown, a lightweight webpage-editing language. There are, of course, all the usual elements for text, images, galleries, spacers, buttons, charts, forms, and links. But you don't get free-form shapes as you do in Wix, and you can't precisely place things where you like on your page.

You need to be proficient at using and placing the Spacer element to position elements where you want them. Some useful integrations like SoundCloud, Flickr, and OpenTable are available, but it's nothing like Weebly and Wix's galleries of third-party widgets. Of course, you can always use the Embed element to grab embed code from any site that offers it.

You add pages from the side menu panel, with several choices (the number depends on your template), including Album, Blank Page, Blog, Cover Page, Events, Folder, Gallery, Link, and Products. You can move pages up and down in the navigation, but you can't drag them onto other pages for a subordinate navigation level, as you can in Wix. Instead, you have to use the Folder type to effect nested navigation.

Web Design Tools

On the Design tab, you can add a logo, switch templates, and use the Style Editor while creating your website. The latter lets you change your template's colors and fonts to taste. Squarespace offers a good amount of customization in this area, letting you choose from hundreds of fonts and colors using a gradient color-picker. Colors are adjustable for every type of button, header, and link, including social buttons. Note, however, that colors and fonts only apply to the content types. You can't change fonts and colors for different instances of a header, for example. The Style Editor also lets you adjust spacing and padding for buttons, images, and titles.

Working With Images

Not only does Squarespace offer integrated Aviary online photo editing for your uploaded images, but it also lets you search for, preview, and buy licenses to use Getty Images professional stock photography on your site. The licensing cost for my test images was $10—pretty reasonable. Unlike Wix and 1&1 MyWebsite, however, Squarespace doesn't save a repository of your uploaded images for use elsewhere on your site(s). Instead you have to upload an image every time you want to use it.

You can add a gallery to any page, or add a gallery page, which takes its design from your template—there aren't any customizations to the gallery's appearance if you go the page route. On-page galleries can appear as carousels, grids, slideshows, or stacks, and they offer behavior customization choices, such as showing the title and description when the mouse is over an image, transitions, and a lightbox for the grid gallery type. You can also adjust spacing, but you don't get the degree of control over the appearance of your galleries that some other site builders offer. This enforces good design, but at the cost of creativity.

Blogging With Squarespace

You can add pretty much any type of content to a blog post that you can add to any other page you build. Squarespace also lets you save and schedule posts for publishing later—an important feature that 1&1 MyWebsite lacks. Posts include a heart icon for liking, comments, and a share icon. You can enable an RSS feed for your blog, and use email to write new posts when you're afield. You can even set up iTunes podcasting integration.

Making Money From Your Site

Squarespace has robust selling options, even for its Personal-level accounts; both Personal plans and Commerce plans let you sell unlimited products. The difference is that Personal accounts carry a 3 percent transaction fee, while Business accounts are charged just 2 percent. Adding a Product page lets you start selling, whether you're offering physical goods, digital download, or services. You can enter SKUs, regular and sale prices, tags, categories, dimensions, and custom options (for color and size, for example). Your site visitor gets a shopping cart, and each product has its own page, for which you can make a custom URL. You can also create a form to collect information from the product's buyer, and you can set a stock number to keep inventory.

Since my last update of this review, Squarespace has added a few new tools for selling online, including gift cards, customer account pages for users to see purchase history and save payment info, and new conversion metrics showing exactly where users engaged with your site. Both of the last two are now part of the Business, Commerce Basic, and Advanced plans.

Formerly, Stripe was your only choice of payment processor, but now you can also connect Paypal. A simple one-tap option lets people use Apple Pay from Safari (on iOS devices or Macs) to buy your site wares processed by Stripe. You can also embed PayPal buttons and Etsy stores. You can set up express checkout, publish terms of service, and privacy agreements, and set up a return policy. USPS and ShipStation integration facilitate sending your merch to buyers. And Xero integration gives you accounting support starting at $9 per month.

Squarespace is working on its own email marketing service, currently in beta, but in the meantime it also integrates with MailChimp for email marketing. You don't see this capability in the Settings panel, but instead have to go through an on-page Newsletter or Form block. I'm told that the new email tool will be more integrated and use the same interface as Squarespace's webpage design does. According to the plan, it will let you reuse site content in your email and see email and analytics together (more on analytics below).

Squarespace also integrates with Facebook for site promotion, letting you sync a page and gallery on your website with your Facebook Page. And Commerce-level plans can tag Instagram posts to direct viewers to their web stores.

Building a Mobile Website

This is a short section, because Squarespace generates a mobile site from the site you built for desktop browsers completely automatically. And Squarespace sites look great on mobile—the whole reason its templates limit the placement and sizing of objects. There is one mobile-only setting: Mobile Information Bar. This is the menu that appears across the bottom of the mobile site view showing contact, location, and business hours, if you've enabled those. In a welcome addition since my last review, Squarespace now shows buttons along the top of the editing interface that let you preview your site as it would appear on a smartphone and tablet.

Measuring Site Traffic

All Squarespace accounts include a Analytics section that shows hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly traffic statistics for visits, page views, and audience size. It also shows mobile site activity, referrers, popular content, and search engine queries. New for the tool is a Google Search Keywords panel, on which you can view keywords, click-through rate, and search position after connecting your account to the Google Search Console. There's also an Other Search Keywords panel that shows terms used on Bing and other alternative engines.

An Activity Log can show your visitors' IP addresses, but there's no view of what technology—platform and browser, for example—they are using. Commerce-level accounts get an extra Metric option—Sales Overview, which shows revenue and units sold by hour, day, week, or month.

Support

Squarespace offers 24/7 email support and live text chat support from Monday to Friday 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern Time. There's no phone support. I asked about how to sell digital downloads and how to connect a domain from another registrar. I started the chat at 12:33 P.M. and received an automated answer immediately, and after a minute another that said that all advisors were helping other customers.

I got a live response at 12:36, just three minutes after my original request. The answers were clear and accurate. My support rep, Linc, explained to me that transferring the domain registration to Squarespace rather than paying an external provider would be a good deal. So the support experience is good, if lacking the comfort of speaking with a human in person. By comparison, Wix offers telephone support, even for free accounts. At the other end of the spectrum, Wordpress.com offers a only knowledgebase to free users; live chat is only for paid accounts.

There's Nothing Square About Squarespace

Squarespace is considered a cool way for individuals and small businesses to put themselves on the web. It also produces great-looking mobile-friendly sites automatically and offers lots of commerce growth potential. That said, it's not the easiest website builder to use, nor is it the most customizable. For that, look to our top picks for DIY website builders, Duda and Wix.

Read More

About the Author

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine's lead analyst for software and web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine's coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of web services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's S... See Full Bio

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